Saturday, September 13, 2008

Quad Modeling | Modelado con Quads

English

This post is not dedicated to specific project progress, even so, this is a post i find very useful for those who are starting in the world of character modeling or any organic object.

In the organic modeling area, "quad modeling" seems to be the weakness of a lot of people when they get started in this area. A lot of them affirm to be good modelers that can solve almost any task in that area, but in more than one video-tutorial i have seen the author explaining what we all know, that we have to avoid any polygon with less or more than four sides (quad) in our character, but again, when the author shows us how the model is created, it ends gracefully accepting that some non-quads polygons could remain here and there which we can/need to keep in non important or key places.

For a lot of time i saw that situation without problems, i found myself in the same situation more than once when i was modeling some organic element and i even thought that was virtually impossible to create a model completely without quads. It happens to be wrong, a "perfect" model with 100% quad is not only possible, but also relatively easy to accomplish when a couple of concepts are known.

It's a basic and simple idea, what is complicated is when it has to be applied and adapted to the different scenarios we have to face, but with enough study and practice, it ends up being something sort of automatic and actually makes character modeling easier and saves us some headaches.

This video shows at the same time, the two situations we have to manage in a quad modeling process, the moment when we have to join or split "rows" of polygons. We will see the process in the wrong way and the right way... At the end we could check that every polygon is a quad, finally, when the model is subdivided, everything remains shaped.

As you can see, the procedure is very simple and only involves some planning. If we see the video as it is, we will learn the procedure when we have to split a row of polygons into two... And if we apply this technique backwards, we where joining two rows of polygons into one.

At first you could see this technique, as something not too "aesthetic" since involves "twisting" some polygons to accommodate to the object flow, but that's precisely the success of this method, the study of the object and how to adapt our quad modeling to it.

This is not a technique you have to use everytime, a lot of elements doesn't have to be so carefully modeled, but with characters when a lot of their actions and movements put to the test every polygon in the model, is when i seriously suggest you to use quads and the good use of this basic technique.

In a lot of objects i have created for this project, i haven't take a lot of care about quad modeling, but when i model characters i can assure you there's not a single polygon that isn't quad!